At ACT, a key insight that fuels our healthcare work is that strengthening public health facilities in rural and remote areas with high-quality point of care screening and diagnostic facilities is the most critical need of the hour. Given India’s growing community of social entrepreneurs who are building for Bharat, we want to support them in taking their health-tech innovations to the public health sector to reach patients from underserved communities at the last mile. 

March 2024 witnessed the first of such public-private partnerships come to life, where ACT For Health collaborated with C-Camp and the Govt of Karnataka’s Health and Family Welfare Department to implement a ‘Comprehensive Eye Care Program for Karnataka using Innovative, Indigenous Health Technology’.

The program, that’s expected to impact 8-9 lakh people across 8 districts of Karnataka, aligns with the state’s vision care program under National Health Mission’s National Programme for Control of Blindness & Visual Impairment (NPCBVI) and will enable the implementation of ophthalmic devices that utilise digital solutions and cloud-based technology to eradicate preventable blindness in a wide age group from 5-80 years. Additionally, it will support eye care for all public transport personnel through screening and eye checkups with provision of free spectacles for vision correction.

For the pilot, this program will leverage the technology developed by Forus Health, a comprehensive full stack digital ophthalmology platform. Forus will deploy handheld autorefractometers for the state-implemented Asha Kirana program, which will reduce secondary screening requirements and its related out-of-pocket expenditures for the population by 75% to 90%. The project will also introduce  teleophthalmology units and conduct capacity building activities in 4 districts to provide clinical support through a hub-and-spoke model. 

This collaboration will allow us to test a unique model to trial how innovators can effectively serve the public health system, and generate rigorous field-based evidence to scale up. C-CAMP will also help support evidence generation and support scale up with the public health system through strategic evidence-based engagement with the state health department. 

Through this effort, we hope to support multiple solutions that can be scaled in the public health system based on strong evidence from the ground and impact millions of lives positively!